Political Quotes

“Mr. President, first of all, I thank Senator Merkley for his extraordinary work on this amendment of ours. We are very hopeful we are going to be able to get to a vote. As it stands right now, we are going to get to a vote because we are the pending amendment. That is where it stands. We are in order. We are germane. It is postcloture but we are germane. The only way we know of where we could be thwarted from getting to a vote is if there were a decision made on the other side to withdraw the underlying amendment. We hope that decision will not be made. These issues are too important not to be voted on. A parliamentary trick should not be used now to avoid a vote on this critically important amendment, which will strengthen in very significant ways the underlying Dodd bill. We saw, weeks ago, that the Republican leadership was going to try to deny us the opportunity to even get to this bill, and there was such a public outrage at the Republican filibuster that they had to back off from that. Well, if we do not get to a vote tonight on Merkley-Levin, there is going to be similar outrage from people because they understand what the stakes are.…”